"Any kind of popular trend is infinitely more wholesome than listening to old records. It's more important that people know that some kind of pleasure can be derived from things that are around them - rather than to catalogue more stuff - you can do that forever"----Harry Smith ^^^^^^^^^^ "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may / Old Time is still a-flying / And this same flower that smiles today/Tomorrow will be dying"---Robert Herrick

Thursday, April 9, 2015

regurgit(aggreg)ation

"It’s a world where Djwwww is simultaneously omnipresent and unbodied, interacting with almost every URL in your SoundCloud feed.... On U.S.M!, Djwwww sounds like he’s shuffling through your housemate’s iTunes library, skipping, unsettled, through Pusha T’s “40 Acres,” Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools,” Grimes’s “Be a Body,” D’Angelo’s “Devil’s Pie,” Janet Jackson’s “Doesn’t Really Matter,” and all the while intercepting your Skype calls and feeding off your news feed.... Stylistically, it’s the CPU equivalent ofNaked City’s jump-cut abstractions, comprised of 26 cybernated avant-garde miniatures, an unfolding from vaporwave’s early fluidity. It’s like the internal mechanisms of Shazam on automatic attempting to discern popular song from a barrage of noise, as you navigate your environment yet ultimately fail to disentangle any familiar meaning from the battery of militaristic bangs, media interference, breaking glass, or the neighbors’ ghetto blaster."

Reminds in spirit / approach, if not result, of John Oswald's maximalist plunderphonia on Plexure:

Djwwww throws any understanding you once had of sample-based electronics and song structure into disarray from the opening blast of sound and sampling on U.S.M! There are no traditional methods of structure, musical forms or developments here, just moments of calm and subtle bliss before you’re pulled back into the violent cold. Spliced and sparse sound-bites, concerted clashes in style, hyperactivity and clinical reflections of an interceded environment are governed by sometimes obvious, sometimes surprising but always lovingly re-imagined samples. Somehow they collide and make sense of each other in Djwwww’s self-developed purgatory: A place in between worlds, utopia, dystopia and heaven and hell.

Where Djwwww’s contemporaries rarely deviate from religious connotations and Djwwww’s collaged purgatory may have its own such reflections, it’s a world built in science fiction rather than Christianity. Previous work has sampled science fiction videogames, particularly communications between spaceships and AI alerts, building a sense of danger and panic reaction, even paranoia which generally results in chaos. This chaotic and high-tech digital approach abandons the world of electronic music still pining over nostalgic synth sounds and drum machines for one which embraces editing, compiling and mutating data.

Samples are broad, anything from Science Fiction videogame and film to R&B collide but they always feel relevant to contemporary subcultures, whether that be the musical underground, fashion or our obsessions towards social/multimedia applications. Even the briefest clip will relate in this way, as 30-odd minutes unfold like a desperate search for a very specific radio frequency, catching moments and static as the tuning dial turns. More importantly the record is built on sounds collected for sound’s sake and the artist’s personal admirations. That much is obvious, but what happens to them once they are processed and tinkered with is an altogether different beast. Djwwww refers to his work as ‘Replica’ or ‘Dummy’ and that’s not a bad cogitation - like a new age Frankenstein’s monster, a replica being or dummy, an imitation but with emotional flaws, the work presented here gives the listener a glimpse into a terrifying idea of what kind of world and society could be lurking just around the corner."